


of sparta, of troy, of nowhere

by behradtarazi



Category: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore
Genre: ?? vaguely, Angst, Becoming a god, Complicated Relationships, F/M, Feminist Themes, Growing Up, Guilt, Kidnapping, Names, POV Helen of Troy, Retelling, Suicide, Trojan War, basically i just gave her some feelings and agency uh, dubcon, this is...basically my take on helen's story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-07
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-03-12 03:55:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29254047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/behradtarazi/pseuds/behradtarazi
Summary: "There was a Helen before there was a War, but who remembers her?" - H. D.Helen of Sparta, they say, is a great beauty.(Helen of Sparta, she wants to scream now, was a fucking child.)
Relationships: Helen of Troy/Menelaus (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Helen of Troy/Paris (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	of sparta, of troy, of nowhere

Helen is ten when men stop looking at her and start _looking_ at her. She doesn't understand the turned heads or the rumors that start to spread across Greece of her splendor. She's only ten. She likes yellow flowers and horseback riding and when her sister Clytemnestra braids her hair that special way. She doesn't understand.

Her mother pulls her closer to her side in public and her father has beautiful veils made for her, but she's a child and she likes to loosen her hair and feel the wind on her face and run free. 

Heads keep turning. Rumors become temptations. _Helen of Sparta,_ they say, _is a great beauty._

( _Helen of Sparta,_ she wants to scream now, _was a fucking child._ )

Those great brutes Theseus and Pirithous decide that as sons of gods they deserve divine wives. Helen is twelve and Helen is kidnapped, spirited away in the night to be Theseus' bride.

It's the first time she is taken. It is not the last.

She sobs the entire time, tears sparking with her father's lightning, and she prays to him, begs, screams and Zeus does not answer. No god answers. Not Artemis, protector of girls, not Hermes, friend to man.

The fools go after Persephone next, and Hades still keeps them as decoration, tormented, on display. 

Castor and Pollux come for her. Her brothers, they invade Athens, they burn palaces to the ground, and hold her hands tightly as they go back home. She loves them. She will always love them.

She never cries again.

* * *

Menelaus wins her hand and the kings of Greece swear oaths to defend her, and Helen looks at their shining swords and bloody palms and thinks, _I could destroy you._

She has the blood of gods and royalty, killers, all of them. It's her nature. Her smile is sweet as summer, and she abstains.

Menelaus lavishes her, when she is his wife. Gloats that he has married the most beautiful woman in the world, drapes her in finery, flexes his muscles and his prowess to prove himself more than worthy. 

He wants her, desperately, kisses her, fiercely, and she's not sure that he loves her. Not sure that he sees her as a person to love and not an object to claim.

She's fourteen and he's twenty-seven and she learns to give him everything that she has in her.

* * *

They say she becomes still more beautiful.

That there is grace to her now, strength, that the curve of her neck and the glint of her eyes are enthralling, that to see her smile is to lose all breath in your lungs.

Helen is twenty-three and her daughter is nine and Helen thanks Aphrodite every day as Hermione looks more and more like her father, all red hair and hard lines. All mortal, no divine.

They are supposed to be protected.

The worst part of it all, of the beginning of the end for a kingdom of plenty, is that she doesn't know _why._

Why when Paris enters the room she is suddenly filled with irrational, total adoration for this weak, foolish Trojan, why she who is mother and queen and wife and puts those things above all else in that order suddenly does not care for her titles, why her gaze is hungry in a way all are for her.

She doesn't know that she has become both pawn and prize in a game of godly pride, that she has been used by the goddess she gave most devotion to.

Paris throws her over his shoulder and she laughs as he carries her away, because she cannot cry.

* * *

They seal her in a city of endless walls for ten long years, and the sun still shines in the sky but Helen can't see it. Everything is dark, now. Paris croons adoration in her ear and she laughs and laughs and laughs, and everything is dark, now.

Hector is the only one she is not forced to love that she cannot bring herself to hate.

He is steady and he is kind, and he has warmth without intention or longing, counsels her and comforts her, and she thinks that she will miss him when her husband turns brilliant, fierce Troy into ash.

She comes to the wall, once and only once.

She stands at the top of miles of stone, ignores the warning calls of the guards and watches as the battle freezes, turns, stares at her, hardened fighters all with their hearts pounding as Helen eclipses Apollo.

It is silent, and she can’t find her brothers, doesn’t see their flags on that vast field, and knows that this time, they will not come for her.

She is alone and they have left her and they are right to.

(She is wrong. They are frozen. They have not forsaken her. They are half immortal constellations in the sky. She does not know that. Everything is dark, now. She cannot see them.)

She wonders how many men would scramble to catch her if she jumped, and she knows that all of them would.

_I could destroy you._

She smiles. It's a heartbroken thing. The Greeks say it is her favor, that she knows that what they are doing here is proper and right. They cheer. They die.

They all die, and she will say the fault is hers, because she has not been taught anything else.

* * *

They marry her to another man, when Paris dies. She doesn't remember his name. She never will. They killed Hector and the last drop of goodness is gone and everything is a blur.

They want her to cry, to mourn, to be their grieving princess.

She will not.

As foolish as Paris ever was, the Trojans wheel in a great wooden horse, and Helen remembers the trickster from Ithaca who concocted a vow to die for, and Helen knows.

She stands outside the false offering and she calls to them, all of them, with the voices of the women they love and left behind, tears their hearts to shreds in their chests, and it is cruel, so very cruel, but when they descend upon this city she wants them _vicious_.

They are already going to slaughter every man, woman, and child within the walls. She wants them to commit atrocities that they will never be able to live with.

She hopes she haunts them.

They attack in the night, and lightning roars, and it is Helen who starts the fire. They do not tell you that the blaze kills as many Greeks as it does Trojans.

She is a demigod. This is a massacre. This is a reckoning.

She has a blade of beautiful bronze, polished until it gleams - a gift from her wedding day, given to her by Menelaus. She only uses it as a mirror, they say.

She stabs her third husband in the stomach when he tries to rush off to the fight, and watches him fall without a word. Guts him, and walks away. Survival is a brutal thing. Survival is not beautiful. Helen has never felt beautiful.

* * *

Menelaus finds her and says that he will kill her for her infidelity, and she throws herself into his arms.

She does not beg. She never begs. She never has to. The fight drains out of him, replaced with that too-familiar desperation, the moment his skin touches hers. She cups his face with gentle hands, and he is aching for it, and she is empty.

They return to Sparta victorious, glorious, and Helen waves to the screaming of a crowd. Helen is thirty-three and her smile is blinding and this homecoming tastes like sickly sweet blood, and she is wanted.

She will not say loved. She will say wanted.

She is the last of her twins and Hermione is long married and Hector is haunting her.

Thousands of ships, launched. Hundreds of thousands of men, dead.

All for...this. For Menelaus' hand on her waist, for the fan of his breath on her neck, for her to be Helen of Sparta rather than Helen of Troy. For the restoration of one word. 

Four years. She gives Menelaus four final years to fall in love with her. For him to show her that any part of this was worth it.

She does not pray to Aphrodite. She does not pray to anyone. She does not pray. She can’t say when she stopped. She can’t think of why she would start in the first place.

They find her, thirty-seven, with red berries still on her lips, magnificent even as the life drains from her. Menelaus says it was a tragic accident. People whisper it was a tragic suicide.

There is no answer, only this: when Zeus sends Apollo to bring her to Olympus, to burn out the little mortal in her that would allow her to die, she curses him for it.

She is Helen of nowhere, and she is the goddess of siege.


End file.
